Writing Testbenches

Handling Errors

It may not be clear when to raise an exception and when to use log.error().

• Use raise if the caller called your function in an invalid way, and it doesn’t make sense to continue.

• Use log.error() if the hardware itself is misbehaving, and throwing an error immediately would leave it an invalid state.

Even if you do eventually throw an exception (if you weren’t able to do it immediately), you should also log.error() so that the simulation time of when things went wrong is recorded.

TL;DR: log.error() is for humans only, raise is for both humans and code.

Accessing Identifiers Starting with an Underscore

The attribute syntax of dut._some_signal cannot be used to access an identifier that starts with an underscore (_, as is valid in Verilog) because we reserve such names for cocotb-internals, thus the access will raise an AttributeError.

A workaround is to use indirect access using _id() like in the following example: dut._id("_some_signal", extended=False).